Do you know what the first victims of the Gilets Jaunes (yellow
vests) movement were? When, prompted by a tax on diesel, thousands of
men and women emerged from nowhere last November to take over the
roundabouts of France, it was a total surprise. Political leaders,
journalists, sociologists--no one saw this spontaneous outbreak coming,
let alone that the movement would last over two months.

Strangely, the first targets of these postmodern sans-culottes were
not corporations, or public agencies, or police. They were--radar speed
traps! By the end of November, the Toulouse newspaper La Depeche du Midi
reported that in just ten days more than 600 radar units had been
vandalized on the roads. Some were destroyed or burned. Others were
covered with paint or a simple tarpaulin. According to specialized
agencies, fully two thirds of the radar units in France are currently
out of service.

These insurrections on the roundabouts were described as
Jacqueries, after the spontaneous and violent medieval peasant revolts
which were directed against the nobility, and from which the nascent
middle class quickly dissociated itself. Under the Ancien Regime,
peasants and yokels were called Jacques, in much the same manner as
today's new bourgeoisie 2.0 from gentrified neighbourhoods casts
judgement on inhabitants of the outlying suburbs by ridiculing them as
beaufs (mononcle is an equivalent term in Quebec).

At the same time, attacks on radar units evoke the distant
rebellion of the first workers of the industrial age, who destroyed
weaving and carding machines. Marx described these early worker
mutinies, such as the Luddite movement in England in the early 19th
century, at length. It was an era that, like ours, was undergoing
profound changes. Laws protecting craft producers were repealed in
favour of what is still called laissez-faire. In 1812, destruction of
machines was a capital crime and several Luddites were hanged.

Coincidentally, the hero of French writer Michel Houellebecq's
latest novel, Serotonine [coming out in English in September as
Serotonin], makes it his duty to destroy smoke detectors wherever he
goes. Two centuries separate the Luddites from the Gilets Jaunes, but is
it any wonder that a movement as spontaneous and disorganized as its
distant ancestor attacks radar units? These "money machines"
bring in $6.5 billion to the government each year. And the primary
victims are the inhabitants of these regions that have become
wastelands, who because of the decline of small towns are slaves to the
car.

In England, it took the Chartist movement and then the trade unions
to calm the revolt against the machines, humanize work and restore
dignity to the workers. Abandoned and even denigrated by the left,
ignored by the unions, the Gilets Jaunes are instead reminiscent of the
spontaneous, unorganized movements of the past. They are justified in
feeling that their protest is a cry in the wilderness.

Some of the very first public interventions in the "great
debate" that President Emmanuel Macron just launched were from
mayors explaining how their small towns were being abandoned since the
post offices, the savings banks and the bakeries had closed. In a
country with such a rich tradition of bread, the country of the
baguette, the flute and the batard, even the bakery has been replaced in
some villages by bread vending machines!

But what we felt above all in these presentations was the infinite
sadness of these inhabitants whose living environment is falling apart.
Villagers who are offered automated counters as their only consolation
prize, symbols of a cold and anonymous administrative machine. It is no
coincidence that many have recaptured the friendliness of the corner
coffee shop in the fellowship of the roundabouts. In many places, that
coffee shop is boarded up--7,000 coffee shops close each year in France.

It is not chauvinistic to note that France has few rivals in its
sophistication in the art of conviviality--of the table, of seduction or
of simple conversation. Well beyond the problems of taxation and
standard of living, real though they may be, what is illustrated by the
revolt of the Gilets Jaunes is that the French will not resign
themselves to seeing their human relations, with the letter carrier, the
baker or even the police, suppressed or reduced to simple, cold
exchanges with machines.

Damaging radar units expresses a feeling of dispossession much more
clearly than the media show of the scuffles in the big cities. How can
we not see in this gesture a legitimate concern about a society that is
becoming dehumanized? The bohemian bourgeois of Paris, the bobos, jostle
peaceful passers-by while riding electric scooters on the sidewalks,
enclosed in their digital world and listening to robotic music.
Meanwhile, the forgotten people of France are launching a warning cry.
But how can you hear the outside world with headphones over your ears?

by Christian Rioux

Christian Rioux is Paris correspondent and a columnist for the
Montreal newspaper Le Devoir, where this article appeared in French on
January 25, 2019. It was translated for Inroads by Anne Michele Meggs.

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